Thursday, May 22, 2003

I’m rolling on Gravitation volume 3. Got to get back in the manga swing. Gravitation volumes tend to be pretty fat, often stretching beyond two-hundred pages. CLAMP stuff is comparatively shorter, and tends to have more action—which is the rewriter’s carrot cake. It’s all smooth frosting and fluff. A good action sequence has full-page panels, maybe even double-page spreads, with a lot of sound effects and at the most, people shouting. CLAMP always puts their big fights at the end, so when I’m about to run out of steam, I get a good clip where I get several low text pages in a row, jamming right through.

I probably should have started on this a couple of days ago, but didn’t get around to it. I did about twenty pages last night, which wasn’t a good quantity for the amount of time it took me. So, I went straight from my day job to this job and am not taking the time to pause. It’s due in a week, and I need to take a break tomorrow or Saturday to work out the basics of an idea for the first chapter for the pitch of the previously hinted-at book series. I’d do that now, but this time was already set aside.

I am thinking of ditching my car. I am not sure. It needs several hundred dollars of work on it, perhaps a grand. I am almost thinking I’d just donate it somewhere, get the tax right-off and start saving money on gas and insurance. Oni was the main reason to have a car, as we had so many errands to run, and Joe Nozemack used to drive a little silver death bullet that barely fit him, much less packages and things. But now he and Dame Lucas have sensible cars, while my Civic is an embarrassing piece of shit that is falling apart. Just two weeks ago Rebecca was trying to get out the back door and the interior handle broke. Plus, every door creaks with rust every time you open it, so much so that if I park outside your house you will know I am there just by the sound it makes (Greg Rucka made fun of it just last night; I should have bent his Frodo poster that I was retrieving from said creaking vehicle and asked him what he thought of that sound (Greg, I kid—go back to being mad at the President, honey; you know me and a cheap joke, it's all love). The back hatch won’t open, and it turns out that the faulty brake light that used to go and off willy nilly and then finally stayed on for good—well, when it started to stay on for good, it didn’t indicate a problem just then, and last time I was at the mechanics, getting the turn signal fixed (and it wasn’t fixed right), they said they thought it might actually indicate a problem now.

I hate property that is expensive to maintain and difficult to replace. I like cheap machines that serve their function and then cost hardly anything when you need another. Or stuff that comes with warranties, like this computer, even if the service people are cocksuckers with no regard for exactly why someone might need a machine to do his or her work, how four weeks repair time is not acceptable. (And then after the four weeks for the service man at your local Best Buy to tell you it would have been cheaper for them to replace it, but that they were stupid.)

Maybe it’s because I look at myself as cheap and easy to maintain and imminently replaceable. Which is sure to elicit a few e-mails from people who want to pet my back and say, “Oh, no, don’t be so sad, you change people’s lives.” Uhhh, yeah, what the fuck? Get off me. I’m Gemini and today I am dramatic. There is another me standing behind me laughing at myself for saying such things, and cracking wise about the fact that I even consider how the four of you that read this might react.

*

Somewhat ironically…or not…a couple of hours later, my MP3 player, which has been increasingly finicky, may have finally bit the dust. It won’t boot up, instead just coming on and showing the name of the player and just sitting there. Plug it into my computer, and the laptop doesn’t even acknowledge that it’s an external drive. Then I open Windows Media to play something on my hard drive, and the computer decides it doesn’t want sound right now, stranding me to the music in Starbucks. The world hates me, and you know what? I hate it back!

*

Driving home, my sputtering car refusing to tell people I was turning left, I started to wonder why these missives are always so bile-infused when I write them from my remote location in corporate coffee land. I fear they end up being the same after a while, and some of that can be blamed on the environment…but I also think we need to consider when in the evening I write them. I usually do these entries first, before I start writing—because after 80 pages of Gravitation, do I really want to do this? So, really, these have a lot of anger because it’s the keyboard equivalent of revving my engine. I’m just getting warmed up, getting the energy flowing.

My confession...

Author of prose novels and comic books like Cut My Hair, It Girl & the Atomics, You Have Killed Me, and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Jamie's most recent novel is the serialized book Bobby Pins and Mary Janes, and his most recent graphic novels are the sci-fi romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Madame Frankenstein with Megan Levens; and the weird crime comic Archer Coe & the Thousand Natural Shocks with Dan Christensen. He also co-created Lady Killer with Joëlle Jones.